Esperanto Affixes: How mal-, -in-, -ej- and Friends Multiply Your Vocabulary
You have already met and in this course, and you probably learned them as two more words on a list. They are not. They are and with a piece bolted on, and once you see the mechanism you get several hundred words you were never taught.
- reverses everything
The most useful morpheme in the language. Put - on the front and the meaning flips to its exact opposite:
| Root you know | With - | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| , good | bona | bad |
| , big | granda | small |
| , new | nova | old |
| , strong | forta | weak |
| , fast | rapida | slow |
| , long | longa | short |
| , to love | ami | to hate |
| , to help | helpi | to hinder |
Look at the English column. Good and bad, big and small, love and hate share nothing. Every antonym pair in English is two unrelated words and costs a learner two slots.
In Esperanto every pair costs one root plus a prefix you learn once. That table alone is eight free words from this course's own vocabulary, and there was nothing new in it.
-in- makes it female
is father. is mother. You already know both, and you already know the suffix without having been told:
| Root | With -in- | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| , man | virino | woman |
| , father | patrino | mother |
| , sir | sinjorino | madam |
| , king | reĝino | queen |
Four words in this course, and only two roots' worth of effort. The suffix goes before the -o, because the -o is still doing its usual job of marking the noun.
And - on the front takes both sexes together, which English can only do with an entirely different word:
patro + patrino = patroj, parents
viro + virino = viroj, men and women
The place, the person, the repeat
Three more that carry a lot of traffic.
-- is the place where something happens:
(to learn) gives, a school(to work) giveso, a workplace(to reside) gives, a dwelling
-- is the person who does it professionally:
(to teach) gives, a teachergiveso, a workergives, an Esperanto speaker
- is again, or back:
(to come) gives, to come back(to give) givesi, to give back(to see) gives, to see again
is in this course at rank 200. You now know it costs nothing beyond .
-- and --: the volume knob
A matched pair that scales the root down or up:
| Root | -- smaller | -- bigger |
|---|---|---|
| , house | , cottage | o, mansion |
| , look | i, glance | i, stare |
| , big | a, biggish | , enormous |
| , lovely | a, pretty | , gorgeous |
English reaches for a different word each time: house, cottage, mansion. Esperanto turns a dial.
This is why 200 roots is not 200 words
Take one root from this course, , and apply what you now know:
(good), bono (goodness), bone (well), boni (to be good), (bad), e (badly), (excellent), a (decent), plibonigi (to improve), o (a villain).
Ten words. One root, plus endings and affixes that work identically on every other root you hold.
This is the honest form of the claim that Esperanto is faster to learn. It is not that the words are easier to pronounce or that the grammar is short, though both are true. It is that vocabulary in Esperanto compounds, because the derivational system is regular and productive and nobody has to approve a new combination.
What to take away
Learn these seven and every root you own multiplies:
| Affix | Job | Example |
|---|---|---|
- | exact opposite | , small |
-in- | female | , mother |
- | both sexes together | , parents |
- | again, back | , to come back |
-- | the place for it | , school |
-- | the person who does it | , teacher |
-- / -- | smaller / bigger | / o |
Then read the table of - words again and notice that you can now say bad, small, old, weak, slow, short, hate and hinder, none of which appear anywhere in this course.